Ellen Thomas (born 1950, Hengelo)[1] is a Dutch-born environmental scientist and geologist specializing in marine micropaleontology and paleoceanography.
She is the emerita Harold T Stearns Professor and the Smith Curator of Paleontology of the Joe Webb Peoples Museum of Natural History at Wesleyan University, and a senior research scientist at Yale University.
Thomas attended the University of Utrecht (BSc, 1971; MSc 1975; and PhD, 1979).
Thomas was the first scientist to discover a mass extinction in benthic foraminifera close to the Paleocene-Eocene boundary,[3] now recognized as a result of the climate event known as the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, for which she received the 2012 Maurice Ewing medal of the American Geophysical Union and Ocean Naval Research.
[4] Thomas was editor-in-chief of the journal Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology from 2015 to 2019, published by the American Geophysical Union.